During Open Enrollment, DATAMARK Helps Healthcare Providers with Document Influx

Major healthcare insurance providers have partnered with DATAMARK for document processing services in the past and continue to do so today.

During the 2017 open enrollment period, 11.8 Americans signed up for some form of health insurance coverage. That is up from 2016’s number of 9.6 million. Furthermore, because Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) have become 400% more popular among customers in the last decade due to lower premiums as well, additional documentation is expected to increase as customers enroll in this insurance option.

Most insurance companies bolster their workload during and after open enrollment season. The reason for this is mostly due to the augmented amount of documents received from customers. Health insurance companies begin ramping up efforts to process the massive amount of received documents as early as late December.

What these statistics imply is that the amount of documents insurance companies receive during open enrollment season is abundant. The Herculean task of receiving, sorting, and processing the data found on these documents is in addition to having to store the data accurately. Because certain data is contingent to specific documents or files, it is essential for it to be stored accordingly.

DATAMARK, Inc., one of the nation’s leading experts in document processing and management, has partnered with major healthcare insurance companies to provide these kind of services since 1989. DATAMARK has assisted healthcare providers to sort, scan, process, and digitally archive a multitude of documents and other customer correspondence for easy retrieval. Through DATAMARK’s multi-channel capabilities, these documents come in through various intake channels to include digital entries and physical documents. Recently, DATAMARK partnered with a major healthcare insurance provider to ensure their proliferating in-bound documents were tended to appropriately. Read about the newly established partnership here.

DATAMARK’s already skilled workforce was additionally trained to handle the forecasted increase of documentation during open enrollment for the healthcare insurance provider. By ensuring the capture of critical information, DATAMARK employees facilitated the routing of specifically-allocated information obtained from the documentation over to the appropriate department within the organization, eliminating unnecessary processes and irrelevant procedural costs. This has allowed the healthcare provider to remain focused on providing their customers with health quality coverage while improving their business.

To do so, DATAMARK uses various forms of automation, which is now one of the most convenient and efficient options when it comes to document processing. Automation is technology applied to business processes that would usually be performed manually. Automation monitors and controls productivity for repetitive processes largely by leveraging robotics and other technology that removes the manual effort and streamlines the workflow.

One form of automation technology is Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. By selecting text from a specific area on a document, OCR can eliminate tedious configuration of irrelevant text, which is not required from the document. OCR technology streamlines the sorting and analyzing of textual data by eliminating manual steps. Consequently, OCR helps reduce both room for error and operational costs.

Additionally, companies can benefit from leveraging the data OCR obtains to make predictions with both changes in customer behavior and in market trends.

In 2016, OCR helped DATAMARK handle 40 million pieces of mail and process more than 250 million documents for its clients, some of which are major health insurance providers with myriad of members. Throughout much of the healthcare industry, including health insurance providers, the use of electronic health records, or EHR, is becoming widely prominent due to federal mandates. EHR help centralize patient information, which otherwise would be dispersed across multiple documents or databases. EHR can help safeguard important information and data for both insurance companies and their members, which, during open enrollment, can either hinder or expedite important medical documentation. With the help of OCR technology, information transmitted from one location to another can be exchanged through EHR applications and leave little room for errors and complications. Billing information, patient medical history, and claims can be retrieved easily through the help of EHR and OCR technology. This article explains how DATAMARK has helped capture data required for EHR.

DATAMARK specializes in creating an enterprise content management, or ECM, solution, which encompasses all the strategies, methods, and tools used to manage all types of data found on documents that enter an organization. This can include, but not limited to, high-volume scanning and imaging, automated data capture, and document management. A ECM system can be highly valuable to insurance companies who are both implementing the use of EHR and currently processing open enrollment documents as it ensures a secure approach to handling abundant complex data. Additionally, a ECM system can help insurance companies stay compliant with privacy and security regulations, including HIPAA.

As applications, claims, and other forms of insurance documents begin to accumulate, one can see how partnering with a document processing specialist can be beneficial for the insurance company. Digitizing and automating several of the processes methods may mitigate the overwhelming amount of workload. Partnering with a document processing specialist like DATAMARK can ease the stress open enrollment can cause health insurance companies.